Trai to get teeth in effort to improve cell services

Fed up with frequent complaints from consumer organisations about cellular service quality, the government will empower regulator Trai to temporarily suspend an operator's licence or levy on it a hefty penalty for not meeting minimum standards. "Once this crucial change is made in the powers of the regulator, it would be able to effectively rein in errant operators. We are currently studying the punitive powers that overseas regulators have in this regard," said an official.

Though Trai monitors quality of services parameters, all it can currently do is warn operators or, as a last resort, chargesheet them in a civil court-a lengthy judicial process often yielding little result. The department of telecommunications (DoT), however, does have powers to suspend an operator's licence for not meeting its service obligations, but this, too, is a cumbersome process.

In its quarterly reports, Trai says most of the country's leading operators fail to meet laid-down service quality criteria on network congestion, leading to frequent call drops, network busy signals and calls not being put through. Apart from being irksome, call drops cost consumers money because they pay the full 60-second pulse rate, even though the call may have dropped midway.

Indeed, noting the serious rise in such call drops, the regulator had earlier this year rapped operators and directed them to take remedial action. "(Trai) sincerely expects that your enterprise take necessary steps to reduce incidences of call drops in the network and also to provide to the authority measures taken to improve voice quality and drastic reduction in call drop rates," Trai secretary RK Arnold had written to telecom operators in February.

A major showdown between Trai and telecom operators on the issue took place in March 2006 when then chairman Pradip Baijal sent showcause notices to all six top operators, including Bharti Airtel (BHARTIARTL.BO : 283.65 +2.65), Vodafone-Essar (then Hutch-Essar) and Reliance Communications (RCOM.NS : 166.6 -1.5), for poor service quality. The operators subsequently moved the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal. A final judgement is still awaited.

Operators maintain that any deficiencies in service quality stem primarily from the lack of spectrum and points of interconnection given to them by BSNL, while DoT maintains that operators do not optimally utilise the spectrum allotted to them.

In a separate move, Trai, over the next fortnight will issue print ads publishing the findings of an external audit agency showing how different operators have performed on the quality of service benchmarks.